Mae La Oon Camp

This last week, we were apart for the first time since leaving home. Jon stayed in Mae Sariang to box and work and Abby went into one of the refugee camps to carry on teaching students who’d had to return to camp to be counted by the UNCHR.

I had a great time in camp as usual. I’d been to a different camp a couple of times before in previous years but this camp, Mae La Oon, is only a year old. It was interesting to see how much had been established in just a year. The site’s a pretty bad one – incredibly beautiful but impossibly impractical. It’s situated on a river with steep, densly-jungled sides. At first, huts were slipping into the river and still do during the rainy season. They’ve managed to build houses, schools, hospitals and clinics and are building and developing further.

This time, I was the only Westerner in camp which was quite a different experience from before. It meant that the students loved to parade me around the camp, to be seen with the ‘gollowah’, and were keen to show me absolutely everything. It was great as I got to see around but had to learn to curb my enthusiasm about visiting every single place they suggested as most ‘points of interest’ seemed to be at the top of a hill and the temperature was pushing forty degrees. I did want to see the Karen Buddhist temple though and was taken there (forgetting that like most Buddhist temples, it too would be at the top of a mountain). They have three monks, one of whom greeted me with betelnut, a kind of local drug which has a similar effect to a strong cup of coffee. He was intrigued to see whether I noticed any effect. Well, I could feel my heart pounding, was dripping with sweat, felt a little dizzy and my breathing was shallow – impossible to tell if that was from the betelnut or the combined effects of the altitude and the climb in the heat.

It was good to see the students in camp and fascinating to see them using skills I didn’t know they had – lighting fires, building rafts, fishing with spears. They looked after me really well. I had to get used to odd situations. On the last morning, one of my students burst into my hut whilst I was getting dressed and said “teacher, now we will go to visit the goats.” There’s never a possibility of hesitation so the next thing I knew I was on a bamboo raft before breakfast being paddled across the river to, sure enough, visit the goats, several chickens and the old man who looks after them. I wasn’t quite what to say but made some appropriately enthusiastic comments and was then taken back across the river.